Byron’s troubles began with a column he wrote for the September 2002 issue of the business magazine Red Herring, alleging that a buyout bid for Imagis Technologies, a Vancouver-based facial-recognition software company run by former FBI chief of counterterrorism Oliver “Buck” Revell, was probably a hoax to drive up the company’s stock price on the Vancouver penny stock market.

“This isn’t a market in which value, like cream, rises to the top,” Byron wrote. “It’s a world where prices tend to go up because someone is helping them up — and just because a company has someone like Mr. Revell on board hardly makes a stock a safer investment.

Vancouver stock promoter Altaf Nazerali has filed a defamation suit in the Supreme Court of British Columbia against short-selling conspiracist Patrick Byrne and journalist Mark Mitchell over material they published on the website deepcapture.com. Mr. Nazerali claims that the site portrays him as a criminal and a fraud artist, among other things. The site linked him with an Osama bin Laden associate and with members of the Mafia.

Mr. Nazerali’s notice of claim, filed at the Vancouver courthouse on Wednesday, Oct. 19, identifies Mr. Byrne as a resident of Utah and Mr. Mitchell as a resident of Illinois. (Mr. Byrne is also the chief executive officer of Internet retailer Overstock.com Inc.) Also a defendant is Deep Capture LLC, the registered owner of the deepcapture.com website, which claims to expose wrongdoing in the markets.

According to the suit, Mr. Nazerali’s name appears in several chapters that Mr. Mitchell wrote on the site which link him to Mafia figures, intelligence figures in Iran, and people with connections to Osama bin Laden and Moammar Gadhafi. The suit contains lengthy quotes from the chapters, the first of which is dated May, 2011. It describes how Mr. Nazerali received a call to assist somebody named “Kott” (a subsequent chapter mentions notorious 1970s stock promoter Irving Kott) in 1979 after a car bomb attack.